“I thought of that,” said Gordon.

The three men fumbled their way down the road to the plaza, and saw, as soon as they turned into it, the great outlines and the brilliant lights of an immense vessel, still more immense in the darkness, and glowing like a strange monster of the sea, with just a suggestion here and there, where the lights spread, of her cabins and bridges.  As they stood on the shore, shivering in the cool night wind, they heard the bells strike over the water.

“It’s two o’clock,” said Bradley, counting.

“Well, we can do nothing, and they cannot mean to do much to-night,” Albert said.  “We had better get some more sleep, and, Bradley, you keep watch and tell us as soon as day breaks.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” said the sailor.

“If that’s the man-of-war that made the treaty with Messenwah, and Messenwah turns up to-morrow, it looks as if our day would be pretty well filled up,” said Albert, as they felt their way back to the darkness.

“What do you intend to do?” asked his secretary, with a voice of some concern.

“I don’t know,” Albert answered gravely, from the blackness of the night.  “It looks as if we were getting ahead just a little too fast; doesn’t it?  Well,” he added, as they reached the house, “let’s try to keep in step with the procession, even if we can’t be drum-majors and walk in front of it.”  And with this cheering tone of confidence in their ears, the two diplomats went soundly asleep again.

The light of the rising sun filled the room, and the parrots were chattering outside, when Bradley woke him again.

“They are sending a boat ashore, sir,” he said excitedly, and filled with the importance of the occasion.  “She’s a German man-of-war, and one of the new model.  A beautiful boat, sir; for her lines were laid in Glasgow, and I can tell that, no matter what flag she flies.  You had best be moving to meet them:  the village isn’t awake yet.”

Albert took a cold bath and dressed leisurely; then he made Bradley, Jr., who had slept through it all, get up breakfast, and the two young men ate it and drank their coffee comfortably and with an air of confidence that deceived their servants, if it did not deceive themselves.  But when they came down the path, smoking and swinging their sticks, and turned into the plaza, their composure left them like a mask, and they stopped where they stood.  The plaza was enclosed by the natives gathered in whispering groups, and depressed by fear and wonder.  On one side were crowded all the Messenwah warriors, unarmed, and as silent and disturbed as the Opekians.  In the middle of the plaza some twenty sailors were busy rearing and bracing a tall flag-staff that they had shaped from a royal palm, and they did this as unconcernedly and as contemptuously, and with as much indifference to the strange groups on either side of them, as though they were working on a barren coast, with nothing but the startled sea-gulls about them.  As Albert and Stedman came upon the scene, the flag-pole was in place, and the halliards hung from it with a little bundle of bunting at the end of one of them.